Sunday, July 26, 2009

The Business of Victims

Recently, many of you probably saw the confrontation between Barbara "Don't Call Me Ma'am" Boxer and Mr. Harry Alford President of the National Black Chamber of Commerce. Mr. Alford took offense to Boxer quoting the NAACP's supposed support for the Cap and Trade bill moving through Congress at a Senate hearing. He told her she was "being" racial and Boxer was taken aback by his reaction. She went on to to quote another "black leader" and say that he would be "proud" that Alford was testifying before a senate committee. Again Mr. Alford was not impressed and made sure Boxer knew it. He told her he was an American, a veteran of the US Army and that she was jumping into a mud pit that he wasn't going to jump into.

The following week Mr. Alford appeared on 'The O'Reilly Factor'. In conversation Bill O'Reilly, trying to be fair to Boxer said he thought that Boxer "likes black people", to which Mr. Alford replied "she likes black people in their place", going on to remind us that Boxer had belittled and berated Condeleesa Rice for not having children and that Boxer was the mastermind who had Anita Hill accuse Clarence Thomas of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Since the incident with Boxer, Mr. Alford has received thousands of e-mails supporting him and his point of view. The National Black Chamber of Commerce is a non-partisan group that encourages black entrepreneurship, not the victim mentality that many liberals seem to prefer.

This got me thinking about something that Conservative author and commentator Ann Coulter has been saying about the liberal victim hierarchy. She said that liberals have a hierarchy of victims and blacks are at the top of their list. But beyond the hierarchy, I realized that there is something even more insidious and despicable at work.

Blacks, and people of color in general, tend to vote for Democrats disproportionately. But why? What have Democrats done for them? Democrats don't put forth policies that have lifted them up or made them more self sufficient. Democrats, and more specifically liberal-Democrats offer programs that make blacks and other people of color more reliant and dependent on government. Why is this? Simple, beyond making them more dependent on government, it also makes them more likely to vote for Democrats so that those programs and entitlements will continue to exist. Indeed even so-called "black leaders" like Reverend Al Sharpton and Reverend Jesse Jackson also fight and lobby for Democrats and the programs they continue to propose.

The reason is simple. If black people become self sufficient and successful on their own, then the Jacksons and Sharptons of the world will be out of business. There is big money and power in the business of victims. So at every opportunity they find racism, racial profiling and injustice to exploit. The recent incident between Professor Gates and Sergeant Crowley in Cambridge, MA is a perfect example of this. A neighbor of Professor Gates noticed two black males trying to break into a home in Cambridge and did what we all hope our neighbors would do in that situation, she called 911. Sergeant Crowley responded, as did several other officers as backup. When Crowley requested picture I.D. from Gates, who's home it turned out to be (Gates had just returned from a trip and had lost or forgotten his house keys), Gates replied "why, because I'm a black man in America?" From here the situation only deteriorated, with gates calling Crowley a racist and proceeded to call the Cambridge police chief. Professor Gates immediately played the race card even though the police were actually there to protect him and his property, which had been burglarized before not that long ago. He was making himself the victim and to some extent it worked. After continuing to berate Sergeant Crowley for being a "racist" and ignoring instructions to calm down Crowley was arrested for disorderly conduct. Witnesses on the scene, confirmed that the professor was making a scene in public that could be heard and seen from the sidewalk. The charges against Gates were later dropped. That evening, President Obama in a national, primetime news conference on healthcare reform responded to the final question of the evening which was about the Gates/Crowley incident by stating he didn't have all the facts, but still said that the "police acted stupidly."

He assumed that Gates, who he said was his friend, had been the victim of racism. In short he made Gates the victim. He went on to say that this was a "teachable" moment for all on the continuing problem of racial profiling in America. This is ironic considering that Sergeant Crowley teaches a course at the police academy on avoiding racial profiling. This is a job he was handpicked for by his supervisor, who happened to be black himself. In addition, two other officers that responded to the call at Gates' home, one hispanic and one black, indicated that Gates was the one yelling about Crowley being racist and disruptive and backed the Sergeant's handling of the situation. Two days later President Obama attempted to back peddle from his earlier statements in the wake of huge public outcry at his comments. But he stopped short of actually apologizing for his remarks and continued to insist that this was a "teachable moment".

But why do Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Barbara Boxer and even the President of the United States want blacks to have a victim mentality? In the case of the President it's because he can't break out of his community organizer mentality, which says that blacks have been the victims of racial profiling in the past, continue to be today and will be in the future. I think that the President also believed he would curry favor among people of color by taking this stance. In the case of Boxer it's her liberal mindset that she can't break out of and because she wants blacks to be reliant on the programs she champions so they'll be stuck in the entitlement cycle and continue to vote for her and her liberal allies. But in the case of Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson it's because blacks continuing to be victims is a big and lucrative business for them. Their organizations exist to exploit the victim mentality. If all blacks were to stop being victims and be self reliant, successful people on their own, Sharpton and Jackson would be out business as so-called black leaders.

If you stop to think about it, the very idea of black, latino and leaders of other ethnic groups is in and of itself racist and offensive, or should be. Can you name a white leader? Of course not. But when there's a problem of some sort between a white person and a person of some ethnic or minority group, these "leaders" come out of the woodwork, demanding investigations, apologies and punishment for the "offenders" involved.

In the case of Gates and Crowley, the people that behaved in a racist way were President Obama and Gates himself. Al Sharpton got his "15 minutes" on TV to speak out on racial profiling and Professor Gates will be able to go back to his classes in the fall and teach his students that racism and racial profiling are alive and well in America as well.

I'm not saying that there is no racism in America, or that no cops ever engages in racial profiling, but we have come a long way. The fact that we've had a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a National Security Advisor and now a US President that are black is some evidence of this. But at the same time, if we can't have a black person and white person have a disagreement or even a confrontation without it immediately becoming a matter of race, how can we ever move forward? If the culture of being a victim isn't broken, then how will the majority of people of every ethnic group be truly equal?

I think it's time people reject this culture and business of victimization based on race. It's time to tell our political leaders and those that claim to be the leaders of ethnic groups that they need to recognize the progress we've made and truly lead by building upon that progress. If they don't, then if they're elected officials we should vote them out. If they're religious or civil rights leaders we should reject them and let them get real jobs. If a police officer truly engages in racial profiling or racism they should be disciplined, retrained and/or fired. But we shouldn't assume that they've engaged in this behavior without all the facts and we shouldn't enable the very people that are deliberately trying to keep Americans down by encouraging them to be victims.

Music for CRF used by permission of:

About Me

Steve is a fiscal & constitutional conservative. He joined the Republican Party to try to return it to it's core conservative principles of smaller government, lower taxes, states rights, adherence to the Constitution and accountability of both our representatives and the government in general.
In addition to hosting 'Conservative Republican Forum' on BTR, he is also a contributor to Parcbench.com. He was the 2010 GOP nominee for Florida State House in District 89 as well.
He's an American first, a Conservative second and a Republican third.